PHOTO BY LAURA PETRILLA

Arush Kalra
Chief Scientific Officer and Co-Founder, PECA Labs

Working in health care was a personal and obvious choice for Arush Kalra. The son of two doctors who started their own hospital in India, Kalra became a doctor and trained to be a pediatric surgeon in India, and came to Pittsburgh in 2011 to study further at Carnegie Mellon University.

While working toward his degree, he invented a material that makes possible the first expandable blood vessel for grafts within infant human hearts — and he doesn’t want to stop there.

“My ideal goal is to make a swallowable [heart] valve,” he says.

Through his and his team’s work, Lawrenceville-based PECA Labs has commercialized and created revolutionary health care techniques for children with cardiac needs, hoping to reduce the number of surgeries they need and to help them have the same development as their peers.

“Connection to humans is all you have,” he says. “I think helping other people is the highest purpose.”